[dropcaps style= ‘square’]T[/dropcaps]his morning, I walked along the beach, taking in the scenery – waves gently crashing along the shore, pelicans catching their breakfast as they dove into the ocean, and the slight breeze blowing through my hair. I paused. I breathed deeply. I took time to remember.

God holds the whole world together.

The most basic truth sometimes becomes the last truth that we live. In our lives, sometimes we rephrase that sentence to say, “I hold the world together.” When we take time to pause, we more aptly realize that we don’t hold the world together. We don’t even hold our days together. There is something sacred and something holy in pausing. And we usually don’t do it enough. So, we go on living and believing that we are holding our lives together and that God is overseeing from a distance. When we believe this, we are wrong.

This is when we most desperately need to pause, pull away, and recalibrate, even if it is only for 15 minutes during the middle of our day. Sometimes we have opportunities to pull away from our everyday life for an extended period of time, but there are so many weeks in between where we desperately need to pause. We need moments each day when we are reminded that God is bigger than our worried hearts. We have to take time to look around us and see God working in our situations, our relationships, and even the most basic blessings in our lives. In taking time to reflect, we are reminded that God is still holding the world in His hand. Pausing reminds us that the world doesn’t circle around us.

Holding Your World

Colossians 1:15-17 (MSG) says, “We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment.”

His hand is holding the world – your world and your life. He is not looking for a replacement.

Rest. Relax. Breathe. Trust.

Take Time to Pause

We need action. We need to move forward. There are goals to be accomplished, people to be reached, and missions to be fulfilled. The focus can be exclusively on the doing so much that we forget about pausing. Because who really has time to do nothing? Yet, without the latter, the former is less effective. A pause is an opportunity to recalibrate our hearts and minds. Intentionally pausing is not doing nothing; there is something significant happening in our hearts during times of rest.

If you feel like you are struggling and straining to make something happen today, don’t try to take over God’s place in your life. Take time to pause and remember. When we think in our pausing that nothing is happening, God is actually doing something.

In our hearts. In our circumstances. In our pain. In our here and now.

This morning, as the world moved forward, I stopped. And in stopping today, I realize how I need to do it more. By realizing that pausing is productive, it becomes a gift to be unwrapped each day.

That gift might be the best one you receive this year.

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About Hona Amer

I help people live life to the fullest. Check out my book, Smart Work U. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. In order to receive updates, subscribe below.